PORTLAND — John Brennan, who stripped naked last year
to protest a security check at Portland International Airport,
said he expects to lose the first round of his legal fight against a $1,000 fine.

Still, he plans to press his free-speech argument in an appeal
and push for effective security checks that aren't as invasive.
"I totally support airport screening," Brennan said.
"I just don't want it to be at the expense of my constitutional rights."<snip>

In April 2012, as Brennan started a business trip to California,
he declined to step into a Transportation Security Administration body scanner.
He was asked to walk through a metal detector and submit to a pat-down.
A screener said traces of nitrates, which could indicate an explosive, were detected.
Brennan took off his clothes to show he wasn't carrying anything explosive
and to get the security check over quickly, he said.<snip>

In July, a judge in Multnomah County found Brennan not guilty
of violating a Portland ordinance that forbids exposing genitals in public
and in the presence of the opposite sex.The judge said Brennan was acting in protest and his strip was protected speech.

A few weeks later, Brennan said, he was told he'd be fined for violating
a rule that forbids passengers to interfere with, assault, threaten or intimidate the screeners.

Sounds he like he was complying with the explicit purpose of the entire procedure--albeit more thoroughly and willingly than was requested. I would rather he ditch the 'free speech' argument and argue directly that this is what they wanted, so this is what they got. What is it--jump this high, but no further? No, goddamnit, if you want to pry into a man's privacy you will pry all the way or not at all--you don't get to pick and choose.

__________________******************There's a level of facility that everyone needs to accomplish, and from there
it's a matter of deciding for yourself how important ultra-facility is to your
expression. ... I found, like Joseph Campbell said, if you just follow whatever
gives you a little joy or excitement or awe, then you're on the right track. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Terry Bozzio

"We only want to look into your anal cavity, we have no desire to look into your pee pee hole, sir."

People need to start defecating and urinating during these searches with an apology of "I was nervous" speaking as someone who has really cleaned up more than enough poop and pee accidents I'm fairly certain that they'll decide they'd cleaned up enough poo and pee.

Or not.

__________________the internet is a hateful stew of vomit you can never take completely seriously? - Her Fobs

Problem is the people in power aren't the ones cleaning up the poo. So they will just helpfully say "make sure to wear gloves."

waaaitaminit.

Aren't *WE* the "people in power"? I know we're not the people who directly write the rules (or pick up the poo). I like the strategy of making this onerous policy even more onerous in the hopes that it will be abandoned, but I agree that this is applying leverage at the wrong place. I think the right place to apply leverage would be where changes in the policy could be made--those people who make the rules--lawmakers, administrators, etc. If *they* were subjected to the same indignities and hassles and costs (and for the same justification, namely none), I think the likelihood of having some reasonable changes made would improve.

The question then becomes "how can we make those people eat their own dog food?" That, I don't know. I imagine such people are exempted from the searches (and the lines!) and therefore don't really get it. Right now, it works out that the people that benefit (and decide) from the rules are not the people paying the costs. That disconnect is a recipe for trouble everywhere it occurs.

Newcastle University neuroscientist Dr. Gabriele Jordan, recently announced that she has identified a woman who is a "tetrachromat," that is, a woman with the ability to see much greater color depth than the ordinary person.
~snip~
Most people have three types of cones, and are said to be "trichromats." Color blind individuals have only two types of cones and they are said to be "dichromats." Almost all animals, including dogs and New World Monkeys are dichromats.
However, scientists have long believed that there are people with four cones who can see a wider range of colors than most of us can detect. These persons are called "tetrachromats," and can see a hundred million colors.

We tear into this show with a dark scene from 1665. A young Isaac Newton, hoping to ride out the plague by heading to the country to puzzle over the deep mysteries of the universe, finds himself wondering about light. And vision. He wants to get to the bottom of where color comes from--is it a physical property in the outside world, or something created back inside your eyeball somewhere? James Gleick explains how Newton unlocked the mystery of the rainbow. And, as Victoria Finlay tells us, sucked the poetry out of the heavens.

Jonah Lehrer restores some of the lost magic by way of Goethe--who turned a simple observation into a deep thought: even though color starts in the physical world, it is finished in our minds.

Which, thanks to Mark Changizi, brings us to a very serious question: what do dogs see when they look at the rainbow? We humans see seven colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet (ROYGBiV!). But as Thomas Cronin and Jay Neitz--two guys who study vision--explain, that's just a sliver of the spectrum. Along the way, we get some help imagining the rainbow from a choir, and we meet this little sea creature, who with 16 color receptors, blows the rest of us earthlings out of the water: